


Except to Heaven, she is nought

by middlemarch



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Family, Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 03:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13022271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: A mystery, always known.





	Except to Heaven, she is nought

Rey’s parents were not royalty. They were not Jedi or aspirants, they were not Force-sensitive. Her father’s name was Ahlu and it didn’t mean king or mountain; it was the name of an herb that grew by a river that had run dry a thousand years ago. She didn’t know her mother’s name. Maybe it had never been said around her, maybe her mother had only been called _Mami_ or _M’minah_ , the word for mother in a dialect that Jakku had nearly forgotten before they left. They left and they left her—with a promise she did not allow herself to question. Not the first day, nor any day after. 

Rey was not a Skywalker or a Kenobi. She was not a Solo or a small, distal branch of the Organas. She was nobody. She had the greatest potential to be Jedi in a thousand years, a thousand thousand, and she was the galaxy’s child. The universe was wild and the Force flickered like a lit Kryzanth-insect in the stars. She did not need a genealogy to justify her power and she did not have one. Maz knew it because she understood the world. 

Rey did not seek her mother because she wanted to understand how she had been woven with the Force in her; she simply wanted her mother because she’d once had one and then not. Because no matter what the Force gave her, at the heart of her was that loss, the void of space when there was no star, no ship. No Force to caress every atom. Not even a ghost or the thought of one.

There was no explanation for Rey. None was needed. Space was dark and wide and every star was very distant. Very few creatures who lived long enough to grasp it spoke or wrote or stepped onto a ship. The Force was not a flame but an ember nearly ash in the cooling hearth of the world. Her mother’s name was t’Ingerra and Rey never learned it. Not in this life or the next. 

She learned it in the last and she never remembered.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before the new movie aired and I'm rather pleased with myself, though I think my version is more generous to Rey's family. Title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
